Pope Francis meets with professional soccer players from the Celtic Football Club, a team founded by an Irish Catholic religious brother, on Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2023, at the Vatican. / Credit: Vatican Media
Rome Newsroom, Nov 29, 2023 / 13:30 pm (CNA).
Pope Francis met Wednesday with professional soccer players from the Celtic Football Club, a team founded by an Irish Catholic religious brother.
The pope, who is known to be an avid soccer fan, met with the team on Nov. 29 while still recovering from the flu and lung inflammation, according to the Vatican.
Francis told the team: “Excuse me, but with this cold, I cannot speak much, but I am better than yesterday.” The pope asked a priest to read his message to the athletes and then greeted them one by one.
Celtic F.C. is a Scottish soccer team based in Glasgow. The team was founded in 1887 by Brother Walfrid, a consecrated Marist brother, to help raise funds to feed the poor.
Brother Walfrid was born as Andrew Kerins in Ireland’s County Sligo in 1840 and grew up in poverty amid the Irish potato famine. He emigrated to Scotland at the age of 15 where he discerned a vocation to religious life with the Marist Brothers, a Catholic religious institute of consecrated brothers dedicated to the education of the poor.
Pope Francis meets with professional soccer players from the Celtic Football Club, a team founded by an Irish Catholic religious brother, on Nov. 29, 2023, at the Vatican. Credit: Vatican Media
Walfrid started Celtic with the mission of supplying “funds for the maintenance of the dinner tables of our needy children,” particularly in the impoverished Irish immigrant neighborhoods of Glasgow’s East End.
“He envisaged harnessing the potential of the Irish Catholic diaspora through the vehicle of a football club. … He believed his endeavor could in turn provide monies which could be used to charitably ameliorate the situation of the neediest members of the community,” said Michael Connolly, author of “Walfrid: A Life of Faith, Community, and Football” published in 2022.
In its long history, the team has been known for its rivalry with another Scottish club called the Rangers, who drew support largely from the Protestant Unionist community in Glasgow, and at some points the bitter rivalry has devolved into violence.
The Scottish soccer team was in Rome for a Champions League match on Nov. 28 against the local S.S. Lazio club and lost to the Italians 2-0.
Pope Francis offered words of encouragement to the players the day after their loss.
“Everyone struggles to win, but victory is not the goal, that can be defeat,” the pope said in brief off-the-cuff remarks.
“Victory is the entire process of playing together, playing as a team,” he added.
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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis listens as Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody speaks during a press conference at the Broward County Courthouse on Aug. 18, 2022, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. / Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Pope Francis at the general audience at St. Peter’s Square on Oct. 18, 2023. / Credit: Vatican Media
Vatican City, Oct 18, 2023 / 09:57 am (CNA).
Pope Francis drew upon the example of St. Charles de Foucauld during his general audience Wednesday in his ongoing catechesis on apostolic zeal to stress the importance of centering our lives on Jesus.
At the end of his remarks at his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square Oct. 18, the pope called for peace in the Middle East and announced that Oct. 27 has been designated as a day of prayer and fasting.
Before the assembled faithful, the pope said the “first step” for evangelization and conversion is putting “Jesus at the center of one’s heart.”
The pope, however, admonished that “we risk talking about ourselves, our group, a morality, or, even worse, a set of rules, but not about Jesus, his love, his mercy.”
He added, in unscripted remarks: “I see this in some new movements that are arising: They talk about their vision of humanity, they talk about their spirituality and they feel they are on a new path… But why don’t you talk about Jesus? They talk about many things, about organization, about spiritual paths, but they don’t know how to talk about Jesus.”
Pope Francis presides over his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican on Oct. 18, 2023. Credit: Vatican Media
Epitomizing this love for the Eucharist was St. Charles de Foucauld, who was canonized by Pope Francis in 2022. Born in 1858, he dedicated his life to missionary work in the Sahara, living and working among the Tuareg people (a subgroup of Berber people).
After serving in the French cavalry, he went on to become a Trappist, going to serve the poor in Syria, an experience that had a profound impact on him and helped define his understanding of poverty. He later discerned out of the Trappists and went to Palestine, where he went to live close to the Poor Clares.
“It is in Nazareth that he realizes he must be formed in the school of Christ. He experiences an intense relationship with him, spends long hours reading the Gospels, and feels like his little brother. And as he gets to know Jesus, the desire to make Jesus known arises in him,” the pope said.
It was this time in Palestine that provided him with the inspiration to write his prolific works, including “Letters from the Desert,” “Hope in the Gospels,” and “Meditations of a Hermit.” These writings became the essence of his spiritual legacy, inspiring the formation of numerous future religious congregations. He was assassinated in 1916 at his hermitage in Tamanghasset in southern Algeria after being kidnapped by an armed tribal group associated with the Senussi Bedouins.
Pope Francis closed his 2020 encyclical on fraternity and social action Fratelli Tutti with a reflection on the saint, writing: “Blessed Charles directed his ideal of total surrender to God towards an identification with the poor, abandoned in the depths of the African desert. In that setting, he expressed his desire to feel himself a brother to every human being, and asked a friend to ‘pray to God that I truly be the brother of all.’ He wanted to be, in the end, ‘the universal brother.’ Yet only by identifying with the least did he come at last to be the brother of all. May God inspire that dream in each one of us.”
Pope Francis greets pilgrims at his general audience in St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican on Oct. 18, 2023. Credit: Vatican Media
Pope Francis, in today’s catechism, noted that while de Foucauld lived “a youth far from God” he converted “by accepting the grace of God’s forgiveness in confession.” He was someone who “drawing upon his intense experience of God, made a journey of transformation towards feeling a brother to all,” the pope said, quoting Fratelli Tutti.
In contrast to the life of de Foucauld, the pope lamented the loss of Eucharistic devotion today. “I am convinced that we have lost the sense of adoration; we must take it up again, starting with us consecrated people, the bishops, the priests, the nuns, and all the consecrated people. ‘Wasting’ time in front of the tabernacle, to take up again the sense of adoration,” the pope said in an unscripted remark.
The pope presented the life of de Foucauld as an antidote to this tendency, saying that we “by kneeling and welcoming the action of the Spirit, who always inspires new ways to engage, meet, listen and dialogue, always in collaboration and trust, always in communion with the Church and pastors.”
“Every Christian is an apostle,” the pope said, quoting de Foucauld. In this way, he continued, “Charles foreshadows the times of Vatican Council II. He intuits the importance of the laity and understands that the proclamation of the Gospel is up to the entire people of God.”
The Holy Father concluded Wednesday’s general audience by renewing his appeal for peace in the Holy Land. “My thoughts turn to Palestine and Israel. Victims are increasing and the situation in Gaza is desperate. Please do everything possible to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe,” the pope pleaded.
He added: “War does not solve any problem… It increases hatred and multiplies revenge. War erases the future; it erases the future.”
In calling for a day of prayer and fasting , the pope invited members of other faiths to join an interfaith prayer vigil for peace on Oct. 27 at 6 p.m. in St. Peter’s Square.
Vatican City, Jan 25, 2021 / 07:56 pm (CNA).- Increasing rumors from multiple Vatican sources say the Vatican communications department might experience a shakeup shortly, and that Pope Francis might try a new redesign of the dicastery that handles Vatican media.
On Jan. 16, Paolo Ruffini, prefect of the Dicastery of Communications, held a private audience with Pope Francis. Although nothing transpired publicly from the meeting, the Italian newspaper La Verità and the political web portal Dagospia – a sort of Italian Drudge Report – reported that the pope was “unhappy” with the poor coverage the Vatican Dicastery of Communications gave to Pope Francis’ latest slate of interviews.
On Jan. 18, La Verità also published a leaked memo from a Vatican News official surprisingly instructing coworkers not to share on social media the pope’s interview with the Italian private television station Canale 5.
The unusual memo was signed by Alessandro de Carolis, a veteran journalist at Vatican Radio. De Carolis is not an editor nor a director in the Vatican media; thus the speculation that the decision to gag the interview could not have come from him, but from higher authorities at the dicastery.
According to La Verità, the Pope was unhappy with his interview on Canale 5 not being more widely promoted by the Vatican social media platforms. The Vatican has 4.3 million followers on Facebook, more than half a million on Instagram and some 800,000 on Twitter.
The interview with Canale 5 was reportedly organized directly by Pope Francis, without the intervention of any official from the Dicastery of Communications. And it was the last of three consecutive “pop” interviews by Pope Francis. The pope granted an interview to the famous Italian sports newspaper La Gazzetta Dello Sport on Jan. 2; penned a reflection for the Italian edition of Vanity Fair on Jan. 6; and finally sat down with the Canale 5 journalist Fabio Marchese Ragona on Jan. 10.
The piece in Vanity Fair was coordinated by the Dicastery of Communications. The issue of the magazine containing the pope’s text also presented an op-ed by Andrea Tornielli, editorial director of the dicastery.
But the other two were not coordinated by the dicastery. Fr. Marco Pozza, an Italian priest and journalist, arranged the interview with La Gazzetta Dello Sport. In a phone call to the Gazzetta office the day after the publication, Pope Francis thanked him for setting it up.
Fr. Pozza is a rising star in Italian media, and his name is the one that pops up frequently as the possible new head of the dicastery.
Pozza, 41, is the chaplain of the Padua Correctional Facility. The prisoners he ministers to are the ones that wrote the meditations for the Easter 2020 Way of the Cross at the Colosseum.
Pozza has been involved in three television series with Pope Francis, on the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Creed respectively. The series were aired by TV 2000, the television station of the Italian Bishops Conference, and all of them were turned into books. In addition, he has prepared a series of interviews with Pope Francis about “Vices and Virtues” that will be aired on a commercial TV station.
Early in his priesthood, Fr. Pozza became well-known for going to bars to have discussions with young people over drinks, which won him the nickname of “Fr. Spritz,” after a popular Italian aperitif cocktail. He later appeared on a popular Italian TV show, becoming a media personality.
The priest landed on Pope Francis’ radar in 2016, the Sunday of the Jubilee of Prisoners during the Special Holy Year of Mercy, when the pontiff received him and the inmates for a private meeting at Domus Sanctae Marthae.
Observers think that replacing Ruffini, if it happens, will not be easy. Ruffini took the helm of the Vatican Dicastery for Communication in July 2018, becoming the first layperson to head a crucial Vatican dicastery. He took the job in a challenging moment, following the so-called Lettergate scandal – in which a letter of Benedict XVI was doctored and blurred before being sent to media, so as to change the implications of its contents. The scandal led to the resignation of Mons. Dario Edoardo Viganò, the former prefect.
Ruffini was able to normalize the Vatican communication dicastery situation and carry forward communication reform. As the prefect, he also managed communications for the 2018 Synod on Young People and the 2019 Special Synod for the Pan-Amazonian region.
Ruffini also handled a significant transition following the December 2018 resignations of Greg Burke and Paloma Garcia Ovejero, director and deputy director of the Holy See Press Office. For some six months, Alessandro Gisotti became the interim director. He was later appointed deputy editorial director of the Dicastery for Communication, and Matteo Bruni was appointed at the helm of the Holy See Press office in July 2019.
The Jan. 16 audience with Ruffini, which happened right after the Pope’s interview with Canale 5, fueled the speculations regarding Ruffini’s future. Ruffini is viewed as a good administrator, but Pope Francis seems to be looking more for a spokesperson. Pozza, who now enjoys the papal trust and confidence, might be the one.
The Marist Religious Brothers have a rich history of promoting football and Rugby among the youth. Wishing gaffer Brendan Rodgers, his footballers, and Celtic fans a jolly good time on and off the pitch.
The Marist Religious Brothers have a rich history of promoting football and Rugby among the youth. Wishing gaffer Brendan Rodgers, his footballers, and Celtic fans a jolly good time on and off the pitch.